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I am officially moving my blog over to Medium. All my posts to date will continue to exist here, but future writing will just be posted there. If you want to continue reading my work, please follow me there! https://medium.com/@enajlaura Advertisements

This past week, President Obama announced a plan to “close” the Guantanamo Bay detention center. I put “close” in quotation marks, because while technically his plan would close the prison at Gitmo, and would accelerate the transfer of prisoners who have been cleared for release, it fails to address some of the other problems associated…

Early this year, the first women successfully completed the training process for the Army Rangers. A (potentially deeply flawed) study assessed the performance of female-integrated Marine Corps combat units. By January 1, all branches of the U.S. armed forces must present a plan for integrating women into combat roles, or a strong rationale for excluding…

I’ve spent the past few days thinking a lot about the shooting in Charleston. While as a white person I think there are more important voices than mine to be heard on this subject, and I will link to some of them, I also decided that one more voice calling out structural racism is never…

In light of the recent news that U.S.-trained Iraqi forces are being investigated for committing war crimes in their fight against ISIS, I decided to do my first listicle: forces that have been trained or funded by the U.S. and then accused of committing war crimes (in possible violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits…

Originally posted on The Disorder Of Things: As per our disciplinary formations, IR scholars often indoctrinate instruct their students with the assumption that anarchy is a constant in international relations. The use of the term, however, generally assumes that there are natural/material constants within the international that transcend central concepts of sovereignty, power, and choice/preference.…

Sorry for the hiatus. My girlfriend and I are spending the summer in Alaska, and the past two weeks have been completely consumed by travel and training for my summer job working as a counselor at a summer day camp here. I was living at a residential camp for the past week and a half…

Feminism Women in Thailand are striving to revive an ancient order of female monks. Economics Switzerland will be voting soon on whether to establish the world’s highest minimum wage: 22 francs per hour, the equivalent of $24.65 US. A Chilean student activist burned student debt papers worth $500 million. It is one of the…

Europe Some profiles of Ukrainian militia members. Representatives of the Holy See (the Vatican) have been ordered to appear before UN human rights panel to discuss the Church’s approach to women who seek contraception and abortion and how the Church has dealt with sexual abuse committed by priests. This is really interesting because these issues…

Asia Massive landslides have occurred in Afghanistan. One village was struck by a first landslide, which buried many inhabitants. When 600 villagers from a nearby town went to try and dig out their neighbors, a second landslide occurred, burying many of them as well. So far the provincial governor is reported that 2,000 have died….

Environment As a follow-up to my post earlier this week about climate change and its impact on security issues, here is a profile of an Oakland-based activist working to improve food security and environmental education in his community. And these cool activists in Cleveland are turning vacant lots into urban gardens and growing crops! They…

In a belated recognition of Earth Day earlier this week, I want to write a crash course guide to an issue that is just starting to get coverage in media, but hasn’t really trickled through to the mainstream: the way climate change will impact international security. Climate Change and Migration One of the big,…